WikiLeaks urges hackers to leak Trump's tax returns
After President Trump backpedaled on multiple election promises to release his tax returns, WikiLeaks urged people to get hold of them and anonymously send them to WikiLeaks, so the tax returns could be leaked online.
The call to leak Trump’s tax returns came after Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to the president, told ABC’s This Week that Donald Trump has no intentions of releasing his tax returns. “The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns,” she said. “We litigated this all through the election.”
Despite a poll which showed Americans do want to see Trump’s returns, Conway suggested, “People didn’t care; they voted for him, and let me make this very clear: most Americans are — are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like.”
Yet a petition launched on the day of Trump’s inauguration, which calls on Trump to release his tax returns in full, has so far gained 262,131 signatures. It only needed 100,000 signatures for the White House to respond.
WikiLeaks is also aggravated with Trump for refusing to release his returns. On Sunday, WikiLeaks tweeted:
While some news outlets are suggesting that WikiLeaks is suddenly interested in Trump’s tax returns, the organization faced some heat during the election over those returns. Real Time host Bill Maher had asked WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, “Why don’t you hack into Donald Trump’s tax return?”
Assange replied, “Well, we’re working on it.”
WikiLeaks then went on the offensive, to make it clear that it wasn’t working on hacking Trump.
President Trump had repeatedly refused to release his tax returns during the election because he was under audit, but claimed that he would release them when the audit was complete. At one point in 2016, after Trump said he could not release his tax returns because he was being audited, and had been “audited every year; twelve years or something like that,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said it was unlikely that Trump was audited that often and being audited did not mean tax returns couldn’t be released. He also swatted down the theory that audits would be based on Trump’s claim of being a “strong Christian.”
WikiLeaks isn’t the only organization which hopes to dump Trump’s data online. Anonymous previously claimed Trump has “financial and personal ties with Russian mobsters, child traffickers, and money launderers,” then vowed that Trump would regret the next four years.
It doesn’t vanish, in part, thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. On Inauguration Day, huge segments of policies on whitehouse.gov went poof. Trying to access “Privacy in our Digital Lives: Protecting Individuals and Promoting Innovation,” for example, now leads to a transition splash page to sign up for updates from Trump. The January 2017 document was archived by the Wayback Machine, but there is also a site devoted to Obama’s White House archives.
Lastly, just to toss out an odd observation, one of the changes to whitehouse.gov’s Privacy Policy under Trump is that the document is CAP-LOCK SHOUTING at you.
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